The cliche question all authors hate:
"Where do you get your ideas?"
The idea is the easy part. The idea is so easy to get, you can't give them away. I'm here to give them away, to share them, and invite you to recognize yours. We're all creative. Not all of us pay attention.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

REINCARNATION, THE FAMILY SAGA!

I can see it, sparkling and perfect in my head. It's got best-selling series written all over it. You take the premise that we all belong to networks of souls who interact from lifetime to lifetime until we've learned all we need to learn to achieve Nirvana or whatever (that bit's always been a little hazy to me), and you follow one such network throughout history in a series of blockbuster historical novels.

You start way back in prehistory; maybe in the late Pleistocene, maybe 150,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first became an identifiable species, and you establish a set of characters and some basic relationships and issues. In each novel you resolve some issues and create others, mixing up the relationships, so that brothers and sisters in one life are parents and children in another, the uncle becomes the niece, and a romantic love which seems destined in Babylon would be inappropriate in pioneer Texas. People accumulate scars that recur over lifetimes, let their evil propensities triumph in one lifetime and overcome them in the next. The audience learns to recognize the same soul in different relationships and roots for them to make the right choices this time: "No, no, don't marry him - he's betrayed you in three different lifetimes already!"

You can't tell me this wouldn't rock, if done properly.

And there's the rub. To do this properly would be a lifelong commitment. Mountains of research, intricate planning, plots that tied up neatly over a single book interacting with giant overarching metaplots - I'd never be able to do anything else! And I'm really not the kind of person who writes family sagas. All that soap opera stuff would make me tired. But I'll read it if you'll write it.

To be fair, after I had this idea I ran across something very like it in the library. Suzanne Weyn did this premise in a single book, Reincarnation. I enjoyed it well enough, but - it's one book. And she didn't research hard enough! It's okay that she uses cave paintings in a way I don't think is accurate (there's plenty of room for honest disagreement on that topic), but, c'mon, none of the Salem witches burned and it happened in Salem Village not Salem Town for crying out loud! I mean, geez, how basic can you get?

Why, yes, I do nitpick and I'm not ashamed of it. I think it's more fun, and more moving, if fiction works with the available facts rather than ignoring them. It's not as if plenty of witch hunts with burning weren't available - it happened all over Europe. So what I want is not Ms. Weyn's book, though you should certainly read it if this idea intrigues you. After all, her take on the premise is superior to mine in that it exists, which trumps any nit I can pick.

What I want is the same idea on a vastly larger scale, vaster than I personally have the skills and energy to undertake, a masterpiece of planning and researching, with just the littlest bit of mysticism in it, not enough to make readers who aren't interested in reincarnation per se uncomfortable, but enough to make the premise feel organic. I can't do this. I doubt anybody can.

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About Me

Author of the YA story about meeting your idols above, time travel fantasies 11,000 Years Lost, Switching Well, and A Dig in Time; Edgar-nominated mysteries The Ghost Sitter and The Treasure Bird; and 7 other middle-grade novels. Plus the stuff that's not published yet.

Glossary

Bruce, Dr. Bruce = our male cat, Thai's brother
Campaign = a connected series of role-playing adventures
Clovis = technology developed in the late Ice Age in the Americas, characterized by beautiful and elegant spear points; by extension, the people who used this technology
Con = Convention or conference, i.e. gathering of like-minded souls
Damon = My husband, Michael D. Griffin. No, D. does not stand for Damon.
D&D, AD&D, 3E, 3.5, 3.75, 4E = various iterations of Dungeons and Dragons, the original role-playing game
Fen = Plural of fan; refers specifically to individuals involved in the constellation of related fandoms that game, read comics, read science fiction and fantasy, etc.
Fortean, Forteana = Weird, inexplicable stuff
Game = Unless otherwise specified, table top roleplaying
LARP = Live-action role playing. Not the kinky stuff, the wholesome playing-make-believe-in-the-wood kind.
Megafauna = Big Animals. Usually, the mammalian megafauna of the Pleistocene
Mid-grade = in publishing, the grades between easy reader and high school level, i.e. variously between 7-14 depending on the kid and the publisher
Moby Dick, Moby Dent, Moby = the great white car
Pleistocene = Ice Age
Recreationist = LARPing with a serious purpose, such as re-fighting Civil War battles without casualties, to understand historical experience better
SCA = Society for Creative Anachronism, recreating the European middle ages the way they should have been
soulsucking day job = every day job I ever had; mostly they were perfectly good jobs. I just don't belong in one.
Speed = Caffeine. Yes, I'm that sensitive.
Table top roleplaying game = Make believe with rules, dice, paper, and pens.
Thai, Miss Thai = our female cat, Bruce's sister
WIP = Work in Progress
YA = Young Adult, in publishing. A flexible term that can refer to an audience as young as 13 and as old as 21.